Italian-Style Tomato Sauce

Italian-style tomato sauce is a classic seasoned tomato sauce that’s popular in Italian home kitchens. It has garlic, finely chopped carrot and celery vegetables, giving it plenty of flavor, so spaghetti night is just a jar and a box of pasta away.

This sauce is mostly tomatoes, with a little onion, celery, carrot, and garlic cooked in, plus a pinch of hot pepper flakes. It’s nothing fancy, and it goes with just about any pasta.

Onion, celery, and carrot are the classic Italian soffritto, the base of a lot of sauces and soups. They’re chopped fine and simmered right in the tomatoes. They soften but don’t disappear, so you get little flecks of vegetable all through the sauce.

You can start with fresh paste tomatoes from the garden or with store-bought passata, which is just tomatoes that have been puréed and strained. I used passata for this batch, and it cuts the prep down to chopping a few vegetables.

This is a tested recipe adapted from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, and it’s designed as an easy water bath canning recipe. It’s one of a long list of pasta sauce recipes for canning, so you can fill the shelf with a few different ones.

If you’d rather roast your tomatoes first, my roasted marinara sauce is the one to make. And if the garden is handing you more than sauce tomatoes, there are plenty more tomato canning recipes to work through.

Fresh Tomatoes or Passata

This sauce starts with smooth tomato purée. You can make it yourself from fresh tomatoes, or you can open a few bottles of store-bought passata.

Passata is the Italian name for puréed, strained tomatoes. Most grocery stores carry it now, usually in tall glass bottles near the canned tomatoes. Look for plain passata, with tomatoes and maybe salt on the label, and skip any with oil or garlic already in it.

For fresh purée, use paste tomatoes if you can. Roma, San Marzano, and Amish Paste all have meaty walls and small seed cavities. That means more purée per pound, and less time boiling it down.

Rutgers is another good sauce tomato, and there’s a guide to choosing tomatoes for canning if you’re planning next year’s garden. Slicing tomatoes work too, but they carry a lot more water. You’ll need more of them, and the purée will be thinner.

Whatever you use, pick fully ripe tomatoes and cut away any bruised or soft spots. Don’t use tomatoes from vines that were already killed by frost. That’s USDA guidance for any canned tomato product, and it matters here in Vermont in the fall, when the last of the crop comes in all at once.

Ingredients for Italian-Style Tomato Sauce

The ingredient list is short: tomatoes, the three soffritto vegetables, garlic, lemon juice, and seasoning.

• Tomato purée or passata: Either fresh paste tomatoes run through a food mill, or plain store-bought passata. Measure it before it goes in the pot, because the recipe is built on the volume of purée rather than the weight of the tomatoes.
• Onion: Yellow or white, chopped fine. Small pieces turn tender in the time it takes the sauce to cook down.
• Celery: Chopped as fine as the onion. It adds the savory note that makes this taste like an Italian red sauce instead of plain tomato.
• Carrot: Peeled and chopped fine. It adds a little sweetness to balance the lemon juice, and it’s where those little orange flecks come from.
• Garlic: Fresh cloves, chopped fine. Jarred minced garlic is fine if that’s what you keep on hand.
• Bottled lemon juice: This is the acid that makes the sauce safe for a water bath canner. It has to be bottled lemon juice, since fresh lemons vary too much in acidity.
• Salt: For flavor only, so you can cut it back or leave it out, and go light if your passata is already salted. Canning and pickling salt dissolves cleanly, and there’s more on that in my guide to pickling salt and its substitutions.
• Black pepper and hot pepper flakes: Seasoning only. Use less of the flakes for a mild sauce, or skip them.

Everything except the seasonings is fixed. The vegetables and lemon juice were measured together, and that balance determines the processing time.

How to Make Italian-Style Tomato Sauce

This is a simple recipe. Make the purée or open the passata, put everything in one pot, cook it down a little, and can it.

Start the canner before you start on the sauce. A full water bath canner takes a long time to come to a boil, and you want it ready when the sauce is.

Make the Tomato Purée

If you’re using passata, skip ahead to cooking the sauce. For fresh tomatoes, wash them, cut out the cores, and cut them into quarters.

Simmer the quartered tomatoes for a few minutes until they’re soft, then run them through a food mill to remove the skins and seeds. Heating them first speeds up the milling and helps keep the finished sauce from separating in the jar.

A hand-crank mill handles a batch this size, and the KitchenAid food mill attachment is quicker if you’re doing a lot of tomatoes. If you’ve never used one, it works the same way as making applesauce with a food mill.

No food mill? Peel the tomatoes, squeeze out the seeds, and purée them in a blender or food processor instead.

Measure the purée once it’s done. Put any extra in the freezer for the next batch.

Cook the Sauce

The Ball recipe has you soften the vegetables in a little purée and then add the rest a bit at a time. I skip that and pour everything into a large stainless steel pot at once: the purée or passata, onion, celery, carrot, garlic, lemon juice, salt, black pepper, and hot pepper flakes.

Again, don’t skip or reduce the lemon juice. It’s what makes this sauce safe to can.

Bring it to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring often. Then turn the heat up and boil it hard, still stirring, until the sauce is reduced by about a third and thickened slightly. That takes about 15 minutes.

Go by the volume rather than the clock. In a deep stock pot it can take quite a bit longer, and a wide pot like a large Dutch oven boils down much faster. Stir more as it thickens, since tomato sauce scorches easily once it’s reduced.

When it’s done, the vegetables are tender but still in small pieces. That’s how it should look.

Canning Italian-Style Tomato Sauce

Keep your jars hot and waiting in the canner or in simmering water. A canning funnel keeps sauce off the rims, saving you from wiping every jar.

Ladle the hot sauce into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Run a bubble tool around the inside to release trapped air, check the headspace again, and wipe the rims clean. Set the lids on and screw the bands down fingertip tight.

Process pints or half pints for 35 minutes in a boiling water bath canner, with the water covering the jars by at least an inch. Adjust for altitude using the chart below if you’re above 1,000 feet.

When the time is up, turn off the heat and remove the canner lid. Let the jars sit in the water for 5 minutes before you lift them out with a jar lifter. Cool them on a towel for 12 to 24 hours without moving them, then check the seals.

Ways to Use Italian-Style Tomato Sauce

Heat a jar and toss it with spaghetti, and dinner is done. A handful of torn fresh basil and some parmesan on top is all it needs. It’s good enough to justify homemade pasta on a night when you have the time.

Or serve it the Italian way, as a small plate of pasta before the main course.

It works anywhere a red sauce does. Layer it into lasagna or baked ziti, spoon it over chicken or eggplant parmesan, or simmer it down a little further for pizza sauce. It’s also a quick way to dress up a jar of canned meatballs.

Fresh herbs are best added when you open the jar. Stir in basil, oregano, or a drizzle of good olive oil right before serving, and the sauce tastes like it was made that day.

Storage and Shelf Life

Once your jars are cool, press the center of each lid with a finger. A sealed lid doesn’t flex or pop back. Take the rings off before the jars go on the shelf, so a seal that lets go later is easy to spot.

Any jar that didn’t seal goes in the refrigerator and gets used within a week or so. You can also reprocess it within 24 hours with a new lid, and there’s more on that in my water bath canning guide.

Sealed jars keep their quality for about 12 to 18 months in a cool, dark place. Label yours with the date, because a shelf full of red sauces all starts looking the same by February.

After you open a jar, refrigerate it and use it within 1 to 2 weeks.

Italian-Style Tomato Sauce FAQs

Readers ask the same few questions on my other tomato sauce recipes: store-bought tomatoes, the lemon juice, adding peppers or other vegetables, jar sizes, and herbs.

Tomato Canning Recipes

Still have tomatoes on the counter? Start here.

Classic Vegetable Soup

Roasted Marinara Sauce (Waterbath Canning Recipe)

Southern Chow Chow (Traditional Green Tomato Relish)

If you make a batch, I’d love to hear how it went.

Once the canner is out, it’s worth filling the rest of it. Here are more of my water bath canning recipes to go with it.

Savory Sauce Canning Recipes

More jars that go on dinner instead of on toast.

Rhubarb BBQ Sauce

Roasted Cherry Tomato Sauce

Apricot BBQ Sauce

Looking for something a little different?